Tech giant Apple appears to be taking a giant step further into healthcare with the purchase of startup Gliimpse, a personal health data company launched three years ago.
It’s the fifth consumer health venture for Anil Sethi, founder and CEO of Gliimpse. The company’s website is no longer accessible.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Sethi describes himself in a speaker’s summary for the Stanford Medicine MedicineX 2016 conference as an investor, mHealth lecturer and mentor to StartX, UCSF, Cancer Commons.
Others describe him as a serial entrepreneur, getting his start as a systems engineer at Apple in the late 1980s, according to Fast Company, which was first to report the news and noted that the acquisition occurred earlier this year, but Apple had not announced it.
Sethi has 30 years of health tech background.
Sethi’s past exits from IPOs include Dakota, a billing company acquired by WebMD, and Sequoia, an EHR clinical data extraction comapny acquired by Citrix.
Sethi hinted at where he was going with the Gliimpse platform on the MedicineX site.
“EHRs restrict and still silo the lifesaving data individuals need to create a longitudinal health summary that brings the greatest benefit to their lives," Sethi wrote in the description of his presentation for MedicineX. “It’s time to invite the patient to be at the center of their data so the collective narrative of the Empowered Patient can be heard once and for all – moving from a focus on pills and procedures to being prescriptive and predictive in their care.”
Apple has indicated a keen interest in healthcare, for example, with its HealthKit app — which helps users monitor personal health and fitness data.
Apple also has teamed up with hospitals and doctors to build a research-tracking app for common diseases like Parkinson’s and breast cancer.
[See also:Johns Hopkins tests EpiWatch app on Apple Watch to track seizures and Cedars-Sinai deploys HomeHero's Apple CareKit app for care transitions.]
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